Continuing along with the theme of influences, it struck me when I looked at that list, how many of those writers captured my imagination with by their astounding ability to explode traditional song forms and still maintain some sort of structural integrity. Growing up in awe of the great American songbook, where artists like the Gershwins, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, et al created these perfect, seamless constructions – it felt like traditional song forms must have been designed by G-d during the creation of the world; and Adam, naming all the creatures, heard a sequence of music, beginning with two verses, followed by a chorus, continuing onto another verse, etc…and Adam said “I shall name this the AABA song form” and it was good…It’s no wonder that I fell in love with writers like Rickie Lee Jones, Laura Nyro, and Scott Walker; they were somehow able to create these kaleidoscopically sprawling songs, where nothing made traditional sense, yet everything worked perfectly in its way. In some ways, these artists were working more in the mode of Carl Stalling who scored so many of the classic Warner Bros. Cartoons (with the help of Raymond Scott’s wild musical fragments).  Here, the "song" form was dictated by whatever happened on screen – directly underscoring every sharp turn and punctuating every exploding stick of dynamite; but these artists were scoring a very different sort of film, where the sharp turns led to places like “Lonely Avenue” and the explosions took place inside real hearts, leaving deep impressions.  Hearing these strange, forever expanding song forms was what ultimately freed me from that long, long shadow cast by the great Standards – they led me far enough away so that I could ultimately find my own voice as a songwriter.  And I guess it’s also no wonder, that though I am eternally grateful to these artists (and I still listen to them probably most of all), my own music turned out to be a sort of rebellion against these very same expanded forms that had liberated me. Once free of the past, I found myself able to look back at traditional song forms and suddenly, even these seemed too large and over-encumbered. I’ve been trying to boil song forms down to only their most essential elements ever since (hence albums like Twelfth Night have 28 songs and comes in under 40 minutes).  Or, I think right now I am most pleased with “Things Are Not Perfect In Our Yard” (a very long title for such a short song) from the upcoming “Departure and Farewell”: one short verse,  a chorus (consisting of just seven words), a bridge (just the title), and the only repetition (that tiny chorus)  – it’s the demi-glace of songs.